An attempt is made to show that Wittgenstein's later philosophy of logic is not the kind of conventionalism which is often ascribed to him. On the contrary, Wittgenstein gives expression to a “mixed” theory which is not only interesting but tends to resolve the perplexities usually associated with the question of the a priori character of logical truth. I try to show that Wittgenstein is better understood not as denying that there are such things as “logical rules” nor as denying (...) that the results of applying such rules are “logically necessary,” but as trying to understand what it is to appeal to a logical rule and what it means to say that the results of applying such a rule are “necessary.” He is not so much overthrowing standard accounts of logical necessity as discovering the limits of the concept. (shrink)

Dieses Buch ist ein Klassiker der philosophischen Anthropologie und Arnold Gehlens wichtigstes Buch. Es fasst Gehlens Modell vom Menschen als eines auf Handlung und kulturelle Kompensation angewiesenen und sich damit eigentatig von der ihn bedrohenden Umwelt entlastenden "Mangelwesens" gultig zusammen. Auch wurde in "Der Mensch" 1950 erstmals Gehlens Institutionenlehre skizziert, die er aus der Revision seiner ursprunglichen Theorie "oberster Fuhrungssysteme" entwickelte. Gehlens Hauptwerk war "ohne Zweifel der fortgeschrittenste Versuch, die Philosophische Anthropologie an die Erkenntnisse empirischer Disziplinen zu binden". Diese (...) Ausgabe bringt die textkritische Edition der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe mit dem Text der 4. Auflage von 1950, der die letzte tiefgreifende Umarbeitung darstellt, die Gehlen an dem erstmals 1940 erschienenen Text vornahm. (shrink)

Introduction -- Basic concepts -- Previous approaches -- Semantic expressions: introduction -- Formal issues -- Semantic expressions: basic features -- Advanced features -- Applications: capture -- Three little pigs -- Applications: creation.

Auch seine letzte Monographie Moral und Hypermoral sah Gehlen in der direkten Nachfolge seines anthropologischen Hauptwerkes Der Mensch. Insofern verstand er seinen Entwurf einer pluralistischen Ethik als Konkretisierung seiner Lehre vom Menschen. In diesem Buch, das eine Genealogie der Moralen entwickeln will, stellte sich Gehlen die Aufgabe, Anthropologie, Verhaltensforschung und Soziologie so zu verbinden, dass vier voneinander nicht ableitbare Ethosformen empirisch freigelegt werden konnten: von einem aus der aGegenseitigkeit entwickelten Ethos uber Eudaimonismus und Humanitarismus bis hin zu einem Ethos der (...) Institutionen einschliesslich des Staates. Gehlen wollte der abstrakten Ethik der Aufklarung widersprechen, wie sie beispielsweise in Voltaires Diktum zum Ausdruck kam, nach welchem es nur eine Moral gebe, so wie es nur eine Geometrie gibt. Systematisch geht es in erster Linie um eine anthropologische Begrundung der Ethik, d.h. um eine Mehrheit moralischer Instanzen und Sozial-Regulationen. Diese werden nicht evolutionar interpretiert, d.h. als Fortschritt von der Nahethik zu einer schliesslich weltumspannenden Moralitat. Manche Moralen konnen als instinktnah angenommen werden, andere ergeben sich aus den Notwendigkeiten bestimmter Institutionen. Immer jedoch sind sie kulturell geformt und zugleich auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen der Abstraktion angesiedelt. Es bleibt im Zuge einer neuerlichen Rezeption von Moral und Hypermoral die These zu prufen, ob die Modellvorstellung eines unversohnlichen Pluralismus moralischer Normen eine Dimension des Ethischen zum Ausdruck bringt, die in den evolutiven Konzepten der ethischen Anpassung an je hohere gesellschaftliche Synthesen unterschatzt wird. Insofern gehort dieses Buch in den Zusammenhang einer philosophisch-soziologischen Grundlagenforschung, wie sie seit Max Scheler und Helmuth Plessner als Philosophische Anthropologie durchgefuhrt wurde und welche Arnold Gehlen - von den Elementarbestanden der menschlichen Existenz bis zur Analyse der modernen Malerei - mit so viel Sachhaltigkeit weiterverfolgt hat. (shrink)

In this book, Arnold Davidson elaborates a method for considering the history of concepts and the nature of scientific knowledge, a method he calls "historical epistemology." He applies this to the history of sexuality, with consequences for our understanding of desire, abnormality, and sexuality.

Most people will agree that if my brain were made to have within it precisely the same pattern of activity that is in it now but through artificial means, as in its being fed all its stimulation through electrodes as it sits in a vat, an experience would result for me that would be subjectively indistinguishable from that I am now having. In ‘The Story of a Brain’ I ask whether the same subjective experience would be maintained in variations like (...) these: The hemispheres are in different vats but interacting with each other through radio transmission. Smaller chunks - and eventually the individual neurons - are interacting in this way. The hemispheres or the smaller chunks undergo internally the same pattern of activity but without interacting with each other. (shrink)

From social media to search engines to Wikipedia, the internet is thoroughly embedded in how we produce, locate, and share knowledge around the world. Who Should We Be Online? provides an account of online knowledge that takes seriously the role of sexist, racist, transphobic, colonial, and capitalist forms of oppression. Frost-Arnold argues against analyzing internet users as a collection of identical generic people with smartphones. The novel epistemology developed in this book recognizes that we are differently embodied beings interacting (...) within systems of dominance. Our social identities and global inequalities shape who we are, who we can be online, and what we know. Tackling problems of online content moderation, fake news, and hoaxes, Frost-Arnold shows that oppressive online structures and practices help fuel ignorance. But she also reveals how the internet provides opportunities for marginalized people and activists to share knowledge online. Drawing on feminist accounts of objectivity, veritistic social epistemology, epistemologies of ignorance, virtue epistemology, and the epistemic injustice literature, this book argues for a social epistemology that values truth and objectivity, while recognizing that inequalities shape our collective ability to attain these goals. Timely and interdisciplinary, Who Should We Be Online? weaves together internet studies scholarship from across the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. Presenting case studies of moderators, imposters, tricksters, fakers, and lurkers, this book both explains the problems with our current internet ecosystem and imagines liberatory online futures. (shrink)

I critically examine Nietzsche’s argument in The Will to Power that all the detailed events of the world are repeating infinite times (on account of the merely finite possible arrangements of forces that constitute the world and the inevitability with which any arrangement of force must bring about its successors). Nietzsche celebrated this recurrence because of the power of belief in it to bring about a revaluation of values focused wholly on the value of one’s endlessly repeating life. Belief in (...) recurrence would bring joy to those who had achieved excellence in this life and crush those who had not. I point out, however, that this significance of recurrence must be spoiled by the consideration that within each of the long cycles of recurrence there would have to be, as well, countless variations of this life. And I consider the issue of personal identity within such recurrences. Is it the same person or merely resembling but distinct persons in the recurrences or the variations? If it is the same person in precise recurrences, should the subjectively identical experience be thought of as really additional for that person? (shrink)

Experience with electronic communication in ethics committees at two hospitals is reviewed and discussed. A listserver of ethics committee members transmitted a synopsis of the ethics consultation shortly after the consultation was initiated. Committee comments were sometimes incorporated into the recommendations. This input proved to be most useful in unusual cases where additional, diverse inputs were informative. Efforts to ensure confidentiality are vital to this approach. They include not naming the patient in the e-mail, requiring a password for access to (...) the listserver, and possibly encryption. How this electronic communication process alters group interactions in ethics committees is a fruitful area for future investigation. (shrink)

Public health agencies regularly survey randomly selected anonymous students to track drug use, sexual activities, and other risk behaviors. Students are unidentifiable, but a recent project that i...

Classical Soviet Marxism-Leninism is in the process of dissolution, with some parts of the ideology being rejected, others retained in one form or another, and new components being adopted. At the same time, a wide-ranging pluralism of new objectives and forms of consciousness has emerged in Soviet intellectual life. Since both the motives for restructuring and also the braking effects acting on the process of perestrojka are significantly dependent upon intellectual and ideological developments, attentive observations of these developments is of (...) particular importance for the assessment of the evolutionary propects of the Soviet Union. At present the situation on the ideological-intellectual front can be characterized as follows: 1. Although official changes in the ideology did not begin until 1989 they have caught up to the initial perestrojka in political and cultural life. 2. Perestrojka has continually waned in importance as an ideological by-word largely under the influence of Gorbachv's 'new thinking' which has turned attention to the dramatic history of the Soviet Union and the plight of the human individual in a society with few prospects for the future. 3. In philosophy the new textbook published in 1989/90 introduces a series of crucial innovations that put paid to a number of classical shibboleths of the Marxist-Leninist world view. 4. Academic philosophy has shifted more and more to a reexamination of the history of philosophy as well as to a reappraisal of pre-revolutionary Russian thought. 5. The critique of Stalinism has gradually given way to a critique of Marxist principles generally, and even Lenin has become the subject of criticism. 6. Fast on the heels of the new thinking and the ideological deconstruction come the voices of political orientations whose differences are so pronounced as to have warranted the compilation of an 'Atlas of ideologies'. 7. The search for a new moral identity has concentrated on three sources: the reestablishment of links with classical Russian culture, the renewal of links with Europe, and the deep-seated need to commit oneself to some ideal for sacrifice. 8. The economic crisis has produced attitudes hostile to individual gain and speculation. 9. Given the nature of the Soviet crisis intellectual cooperation with the West has to take forms which promote the rekindling of a sense of all-human awareness of the transcendent and reinforce the experience of common humanity. 10. The establishment of all-European academic institutions designed in their very structure to engage in mutual cooperation could have a catalytic effect on the reconfiguration of Europe. (shrink)

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity (...) by asking six questions: what is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the relation between simplicity and empirical modelling? What is the relation between simplicity and prediction? What is the connection between simplicity and convenience? The book concludes with reflections on simplicity by Nobel Laureates in Economics. (shrink)

I argue that a certain type of naturalist should not accept a prominent version of the no-miracles argument (NMA). First, scientists (usually) do not accept explanations whose explanans-statements neither generate novel predictions nor unify apparently disparate established claims. Second, scientific realism (as it appears in the NMA) is an explanans that makes no new predictions and fails to unify disparate established claims. Third, many proponents of the NMA explicitly adopt a naturalism that forbids philosophy of science from using any methods (...) not employed by science itself. Therefore, such naturalistic philosophers of science should not accept the version of scientific realism that appears in the NMA. (shrink)

I provide an account of the cognitive attitude of trust that explains the role trust plays in the planning of rational agents. Many authors have dismissed choosing to trust as either impossible or irrational; however, this fails to account for the role of trust in practical reasoning. A can have therapeutic, coping, or corrective reasons to trust B to ${\phi}$ , even in the absence of evidence that B will ${\phi}$ . One can choose to engage in therapeutic trust to (...) inspire trustworthiness, coping trust to simplify one’s planning, or corrective trust to avoid doing a testimonial injustice. To accommodate such types of trust, without accepting doxastic voluntarism, requires an account of the cognitive attitude of trust broader than belief alone. I argue that trust involves taking the proposition that someone will do something as a premise in one’s practical reasoning, which can be a matter of believing or accepting the proposition. I defend this account against objections that it (i) provides insufficient rational constraints on trust, (ii) conflates trust and pretense of trust, and (iii) cannot account for the rationality of back-up planning. (shrink)

During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard, holding regular private meetings, with Carnap, Tarski, and Quine. Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall for their conversations. Carnap took detailed notes during his year at Harvard. This book includes both a German transcription of these shorthand notes and an English translation in the appendix section. Carnap’s notes cover a wide range of topics, but surprisingly, the (...) most prominent question is: If the number of physical items in the universe is finite, what form should scientific discourse take? This question is closely connected to an abiding philosophical problem: What is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the material realm? Carnap, Tarski, and Quine’s attempts to answer this question involve issues central to philosophy today.This book focuses on three such issues: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. In short, the book reconstructs the lines of argument represented in these Harvard discussions, discusses their historical significance (especially Quine’s break from Carnap), and relates them when possible to contemporary treatments of these issues. (shrink)

Containing the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on epistemology and politics, this book also features the most significant essays by the most important French thinkers who influenced and were influenced by Foucault. Foucault's teachers, colleagues, and collaborators take up his major claims, from his first to final works, and provide us with the authoritative context in which to understand Foucault's writings. This volume also includes several important works by Foucault previously unpublished in English. The other contributors are Georges (...) Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Michel Serres, and Paul Veyne. Here for the first time is the French Foucault. This volume offers lucid and important texts that will appeal to students and professors at every level of study. It is essential reading for all scholars of twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

Since anonymous agents can spread misinformation with impunity, many people advocate for greater accountability for internet speech. This paper provides a veritistic argument that accountability mechanisms can cause significant epistemic problems for internet encyclopedias and social media communities. I show that accountability mechanisms can undermine both the dissemination of true beliefs and the detection of error. Drawing on social psychology and behavioral economics, I suggest alternative mechanisms for increasing the trustworthiness of internet communication.

Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that one and (...) the same person possesses both bodies, occupies both places and will experience both awakenings, just as a person whose brain has been bisected must at once experience both of the unconnected fields of awareness, even though each of these will falsely appear to him as the entirety of his experience. I also claim that the more usual apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience - its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience. One powerful argument for this is statistical: on the ordinary view of personhood it is an incredible coincidence for you (though not for others) that out of 200,000,000 sperm cells the very one required on each occasion for your future existence was first to the egg in each of the begettings of yourself and all your ancestors. The only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway. It is a consequence that self-interest should extend to all conscious organisms. (shrink)

"These sixteen essays by Arnold Isenberg "bring wide-ranging connoiseurship, intricate analysis, and epigrammatic literacy to bear on a number of glib and fuzzy oppositions between form and content, description and interpretation, ...

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity (...) by asking six questions: what is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the relation between simplicity and empirical modelling? What is the relation between simplicity and prediction? What is the connection between simplicity and convenience? The book concludes with reflections on simplicity by Nobel Laureates in Economics. (shrink)

Gehlen's core idea in Man is that humans have unique properties which distinguish them from all other species: 1. world-openness, a concept originally coined by Max Scheler, which describes the ability of humans to adapt to various environments (as contrasted with animals, which can only survive in environments which match their evolutionary specialisation). This gives us 2. the ability to shape our environment according to our intentions, and it comprises a view of language as a way of acting (Gehlen was (...) one of the first proponents of speech act theory), Human beings are also marked 3. by an excess of impulses and by 4. the ability of self-control. These properties allow us (again in contrast to all other animals) 5. to create our own (for example cultural) environments. Gehlen's philosophy has influenced many contemporary German thinkers in a range of disciplines, including Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Niklas Luhmann in sociology, and Hans Blumenberg in philosophy. (shrink)

Ignorance of one’s privileges and prejudices is an epistemic problem. While the sources of ignorance of privilege and prejudice are increasingly understood, less clarity exists about how to remedy ignorance. In fact, the various causes of ignorance can seem so powerful, various, and mutually reinforcing that studying the epistemology of ignorance can inspire pessimism about combatting socially constructed ignorance. I argue that this pessimism is unwarranted. The testimony of members of oppressed groups can often help members of privileged groups overcome (...) their ignorance. This paper argues that a particular type of speaker’s trust—hopeful trust—can motivate hearers to become cognizant of their privilege and prejudice. I argue that hopeful trust is a powerful way of eliciting trust-responsiveness that can be an effective mechanism for challenging privilege and prejudice. To make this case, I draw on case studies of online attempts to challenge ignorance. While the problems of testimonial injustice, defensi... (shrink)

A thoughtful meditation on the role of meaning and purpose in the development of technology.

In this 1992 book, Professor Koslow advances an account of the basic concepts of logic. A central feature of the theory is that it does not require the elements of logic to be based on a formal language. Rather, it uses a general notion of implication as a way of organizing the formal results of various systems of logic in a simple, but insightful way. The study has four parts. In the first two parts the various sources of the general (...) concept of an implication structure and its forms are illustrated and explained. Part 3 defines the various logical operations and systematically explores their properties. A generalized account of extensionality and dual implication is given, and the extensionality of each of the operators, as well as the relation of negation and its dual, are given substantial treatment because of the novel results they yield. Part 4 considers modal operators and studies their interaction with logical operators. By obtaining the usual results without the usual assumptions this new approach allows one to give a very simple account of modal logic minus the excess baggage of possible world semantics. (shrink)

PART 1: DEATH AND DYING: 1. The medical definition of death /A Keith Mant. 2. Philosophical concepts of death / Ninian Smart. 3. The dying and the doctor / John Hinton. 4. Death and the young /Simon Yudkin.

Foreword by Students' Committee.--Signatures of the Graduate Faculty members.--Faculty foreword.--Introduction: The life and the political philosophy of Arnold Brecht.--Relative and absolute justice.--The rise of relativism in political and legal philosophy.--The search for absolutes in political and legal philosophy.--The myth of is and ought.--The impossible in political and legal philosophy.--The latent place of God in twentieth-century political theory.--Bibliography of books and articles by Arnold Brecht (p. [161]-174)--Biographical summary of Arnold Brecht.

Foreword by Students' Committee.--Signatures of the Graduate Faculty members.--Faculty foreword.--Introduction: The life and the political philosophy of Arnold Brecht.--Relative and absolute justice.--The rise of relativism in political and legal philosophy.--The search for absolutes in political and legal philosophy.--The myth of is and ought.--The impossible in political and legal philosophy.--The latent place of God in twentieth-century political theory.--Bibliography of books and articles by Arnold Brecht (p. [161]-174)--Biographical summary of Arnold Brecht.